A former lawmaker accused of submitting fraudulent expense claims to parliament was “heavily addicted to cocaine” and living beyond his means, a court has heard.
Jared O’Mara is accused of committing eight counts of “brazen” fraud while he was Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam, England. It is also alleged he tried to claim about £30,000 (US$37,223) of taxpayers’ money using false invoices for organizations that did not exist.
On the first day of his trial at Leeds crown court, a jury heard that O’Mara submitted fake invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), the body set up to scrutinize lawmakers’ claims after the expenses scandal.
Prosecutor James Bourne-Arton said part of the fraud involved making a fictional charity called “Confident About Autism South Yorkshire” to claim payments.
O’Mara, who was not present in court and attended via video link from his home in Sheffield, denies all charges.
Bourne-Arton said O’Mara, who resigned from parliament in 2019 after two years, was living “beyond his means and in dire need of cash” caused by “funding a significant cocaine habit.”
“It was an invention of Jared O’Mara that he hoped to slip through as a legitimate claim, no doubt seeking to hide behind the fact that it related to his disability if ever challenged,” he told the jury.
The court heard how O’Mara planned to share the proceeds of fraud with his co-accused, his “old friends” Gareth Arnold and John Woodliff — both of whom he employed in his office in 2019.
Arnold, from Dronfield, Derbyshire, was O’Mara’s chief of staff during the 2019 general election and helped submit the expenses, while Woodliff, from Sheffield, was employed on a £28,800 salary as a constituency support worker, a role the prosecution said he did not carry out.
Arnold is accused of six counts of fraud relating to the expenses and Woodliff one count of fraud, based on not carrying out the support worker role. Both deny the charges against them.
The court heard how the invoices from Confident About Autism were “in different formats, have inconsistent references and in one case was dated for a date after it was submitted for payment,” Bourne-Arton said.
Shortly after being submitted, the invoices were rejected by IPSA, which had become concerned about the validity of the claims and asked for more evidence.
Around the same time, Arnold went to South Yorkshire police to report the fraud, which he “was no longer willing to participate in,” Bourne-Arton said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.